"Come here!" shrilled the novelist.
The stranger receded coyly.
Mr. Watson advanced at the double.
His quarry dodged behind a tree.
For five minutes the great man devoted his powerful mind solely to the task of catching his visitor.
The latter, however, proved as elusive as the point of a half-formed epigram, and at the end of the five minutes he was no longer within sight.
Mr. Watson went off and addressed his keeper in terms which made that worthy envious for a week.
"It's eddication," he said subsequently to a friend at the "Cowslip Inn." "You and me couldn't talk like that. It wants eddication."
For the next few days the keeper's existence was enlivened by visits from what appeared to be a most enthusiastic bird's-nester. By no other theory could he account for it. Only a boy with a collection to support would run such risks.
To the keeper's mind the human boy up to the age of twenty or so had no object in life except to collect eggs. After twenty, of course, he took to poaching. This was a boy of about seventeen.